I wonder if they’re aware of the colossal creature approaching. Do they sense its lumbering footfalls? Do the walls tremble, or the avenues and galleries of their metropolis deform perceptibly under its weight? Can they sense its extravagant metabolic heat?

The mounds that pimple this sloping pasture are silent. The sheep were taken off a week or two back, but there’s been virtually no rain, so the turf tops remain cropped and dry – they look like a crowd of skinheads frowning into the longer grass around, some with tiaras of speedwell. Each tump is tall enough to escape winter waterlogging and, coincidentally, the perfect height for sitting on. If the residents object to me perching on their home like some mammal Godzilla, they don’t show it.

In pictures: Micro bug photography

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If this were a wood ant nest, my imposition would be the subject of teeming, acidic fury. But these are Lasius flavus, yellow meadow ants. They’re peaceable homebodies, shunners of light. The only sign of recent activity is a sprinkling of soil particles in the thatch of every hill, each the measure of an ant mouthful.

It’s going to take a bit of destruction to rouse them, and I scrape tentatively at the side of the hump. The soil crumbles as I break into a labyrinth of tunnels. It’s unkind of me, but I have a Country diary to write.

Like all ants, yellow meadows are solidly socialist. A straggle of workers emerge – six, a dozen, 30 – all daughters of the queen. But their movements suggest curiosity rather than outrage – they bumble this way and that, antennae waggling.

They range considerably in size, some only 2mm long, the largest about half a centimetre. They’re the colour of golden syrup and, close up, decidedly cute. Their eyes are microscopic and seldom used – as a rule they work in the dark, tending herds of subterranean aphids plugged into the roots of grass, their husbandry practised by scent and touch – stroking, cleaning, milking honeydew.

These tiny farmers have probably never seen sunlight before, but they don’t linger. There are aphids to milk, larvae to feed, tunnels to dig. A minute later, they’re gone.